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Unfortunatly i have a very small player base, two at this time, who both have chosen striker characters. So my options for encounters are kind of forced towards minions. Things get very boring when theres only 2 creatures in each fight. While this has made encounter design tough I’ve also had to come up with other ways to fill out encounters and utilize minions.

Now while this has been annoying at the start I’ve come up with a few tricks to make things a little more interesting.

Firstly. When I first started running minions my players got a strong sense on who they were by me simply saying. “ok you hit its dead” I had to adapt and have since made players roll damage for each attack. Now while this seems like a common sense stand point and many would say, well there gonna know their minions when they deal 8 damage and it dies. That brings me to my second point.

I use one of two specialized templates for some monsters to round out battles and make things a little more dangerous. First is the Underling. You can replace 3 underlings for every 1 standard monster. They have 30% of the hit points of a standard monster but deal 25% more damage. This makes them abit more lethal, but easier to drop. Also fills out the roles and allows for me to throw in a few more enemies instead of just the 2 standards or a bunch of minions.

Ive also taken to using the lackey template. Basically the lackey deals damage like a normal monster but has a 2 hit damage threshold. All attacks deal 1 damage regardless of what it is and a critical hit kills the lackey outright. Now looking at some of the other posts I might opt to let dailys kill them outright too. Perhaps even encounters.

My other point to fact is I use 6 minions for every 1 standard instead of the normal 4. It doesn’t make things much more lethal but keeps the players in the feel of being in a situation that might not bode too well.

Some of the other ideas on this thread about minions are defiantly worth looking into and I might incorporate a few them in my upcoming games.

Aug 3, 2011 -- 3:46AM, frothsof wrote:

totally hate multi-wound minions. i don't mind them exploding or having damage buffs, but forcing the players to spam at wills on minions that take more than one hit is, among other things, boring as hell for all parties. just use a ton of them

In the final encounter of last night's session, my five players encountered a gang of sixteen bandits that were intent on recovering a certain item the PCs had. I tried out the two-hit minion approach. Is was beautiful!

I was able to run the entire encounter with no paperwork or off-map tracking! To maintain the perceived threat of the encounter, I would, every now and then, ask the player to repeat the amount of damage they caused, then feign a quick mental calculation before placing the bloodied token or removing the figure from the battle.

• The shifter rogue was bloodied in one round. He shifted (an every-encounter objective he has set), Low-Slashed and Piercing-Strike'd one enemy dead, and proceeded to work his magic each round thereafter, either bloodying or killing an enemy with each attack.
• The dwarf paladin managed to mark six enemies in round two with his Call of Challenge, effectively protecting the rogue for the rest of the encounter.
• The wizard, who usually hangs back and attacks from a distance, found himself surrounded by four bandits who entered in round two. He fled with six hit points, but not before hitting with an AOE that bloodied four of the bandits.
• The pacifist cleric pulled off Hymn of Resurgence in the second round, making the assault that much easier for everyone.
• The half-orc monk showed restraint, turning the killing blow of the last enemy into a knockout punch instead. They won the battle and had a prisoner to interrogate.